


don't leave this world to me

by claudia_allison_stilinski



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, an emotional tether, lydia remembers, stiles goes missing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-07-21
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:50:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7543936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claudia_allison_stilinski/pseuds/claudia_allison_stilinski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The unexplainable, intuitive sense of the world being slightly askew hums at her, constant, like someone plucking a harp string inside her head; Orpheus plucking his golden lyre, urging her to <i>Remember, remember, remember.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	don't leave this world to me

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Stiles/Lydia Fest (http://stileslydiafest.tumblr.com).
> 
> Prompt: “In the end, maybe love just meant longing for something  
> impossibly bright and forever out of reach.”- Leigh Bardugo, “Ruin and Rising”
> 
> Title from “Winter is All Over You” by First Aid Kit. Huge thanks to lisa (innergreyclouds @ tumblr) for the beta, and the stydia trash gc for listening to me wail. Writing this felt like ripping my own heart out of my chest.
> 
> This was also written prior to the S6 trailer, so.

It starts as a tiny nagging feeling hovering just over her shoulder, irritating as a mosquito, which grows into a sense of _not right_ needling at her subconscious. She attempts to push the feeling away, citing lack of sleep, or excessive caffeine or the anticipation of college acceptances. For once, logic fails. The unexplainable, intuitive sense of the world being slightly askew hums at her, constant, like someone plucking a harp string inside her head; Orpheus plucking his golden lyre, urging her to _Remember, remember, remember._ She goes so far as to head home during her free period to make sure that she turned her curling iron off. (She had.)

She feels unhinged. 

She eats lunch with Malia and Scott, clinging to some sense of normalcy, but she cannot shake the sensation that some intangible piece is just… missing. There’s a void she can’t quite grasp. She broaches the topic, hesitant, unsure how to put _It’s just a (banshee?) feeling_ into words. Surprisingly, they agree, they’re feeling a bit... off-kilter, too - but isn’t it Beacon Hills, aren’t things always a little weird? Concern etched across his features, Scott promises to look into things, a solemn vow. 

On her way home, she stops at the grocery store to pick up a few things for dinner, per her mother’s request. While she’s perusing the aisles, looking for the specified brand of quinoa, a box of macaroni and cheese touting Minion-shaped pasta catches her eye. For the first time in days, she feels like smiling, so she tosses it into the cart without a second thought. 

It’s a compilation of barely-there moments, whispers of something once tangible. Naturally, Lydia has lost things before, both corporeal and metaphysical - her raggedy stuffed unicorn called Gary, her favorite MAC lipstick, her virginity, and (questionably) her mind. Her gaze lingers too long after she parks next to a Jeep at the mall, a pang thrumming through her chest. When she passes through doorways, sometimes she even swears she feels the brush of a hand on the small of her back, guiding her through, even when no one else is nearby. 

Whatever she lost this time, was her own cavalier carelessness at fault again? 

In AP English, the teacher is droning on about Yeats and allusive imagery. Lydia is mostly not listening, choosing instead to stare at the empty seat beside her, which had been empty the day before, as well as the day before that. The ordinary wooden desk, which should be innocuous enough, causes all of the hairs on the back of her neck to stand up. Something is wrong. 

She needs to know _why._

Whenever she hears something interesting on NPR, or overhears one of the characters on her mother’s ridiculous housewives show say something particularly insane, she reaches for her phone automatically, fingers itching to send a text, but then she pauses, unsure - no, Scott wouldn’t find her biting commentary regarding the banality of reality shows particularly funny, nor would Malia care about the political climate in South Sudan. Not for the first time, but louder now, a small (ever-growing) voice in her mind insists: _Someone’s missing._

She goes to class, idly flips through AP exam review books, but she cannot focus on Calculus when a much larger, real-life equation desperately needs solving. Lydia Martin intensely dislikes not knowing, loathes how her reality now feels like a document that has been photocopied a dozen too many times - smudgy, messy, in need of some goddamn toner. She goes home, eats dinner with her mother, does her homework, worries. 

The weather of Beacon Hills apparently decides to match up with her current emotional state, dousing the town with an uncharacteristic amount of rainfall. Lydia roots around in her trunk for her spare umbrella, instead pulling out a worn flannel shirt that decidedly does not belong to her. She stares at it in wonder, eventually bringing it to her face. It smells like laundry detergent and pine trees and boy and achingly familiar. She shows Scott and Malia, with the supernaturally-enhanced senses, immediately via an impromptu pack meeting, huddled in a corner of the boys’ locker room. Malia’s eyebrows are knit together, frustrated, and Scott’s nodding emphatically, mouth agape. “Yes,” he’s saying, bewildered and agreeing with the girls. “This scent.. You’re right. it’s so familiar, but I can’t place it.” 

_I’m not crazy,_ she thinks, part of her relieved. 

_Or maybe we all are?_

(Only later will she research and wonder about schizophrenia - early adulthood is the right time for that - or early onset dementia. At the thought of dementia, for whatever reason, her insides twist and clench, causing her to close her laptop abruptly and climb into bed, pulling her duvet over her head.) 

That night, she dreams of a plucky boy with a buzz cut and earnest amber eyes, who follows close behind her. She wakes up with tears in her eyes, unable to recall specifics of the dream, left reeling and wondering: _Is it you?_ She’s plagued with homesickness the rest of the day, missing someone who may or may not be real with a desperation she’s afraid to quantify. 

You can’t just erase a person. 

Can you? 

Can _they?_

She eventually dreams again, the second time featuring a boy with longer hair and a broken expression. At first, she thinks it’s an entirely different boy - this one is tired, all the lightness drained from him. When they meet hers, his eyes - yes, amber - bore into hers so earnestly. Her heart aches, laments, really, the evidence that something - supernatural, no doubt, and unquestionably tragic - happened to the boy with the buzz cut. This time, the boy stays at her side, a baseball bat in hand. A protector? A companion? The plaid shirt. _A friend,_ she thinks. _More._

The twinge of incompletion grows to prickly foreboding with a hint of dread, sour on her tongue no matter how much sweetened coffee she consumes. Which then blooms into lush and thorough, encompassing panic. Panic which comes to an explosive peak one Tuesday morning in the middle of AP English, when the teacher - still droning on about Yeats - brings up a particular poem, “The Hosting of the Sidhe.” 

Pressure has been building up behind Lydia’s eyeballs, inside her skull, around her heart. At the teacher’s passing reference to “the Wild Hunt,” piercing recognition zips up her spine. A catalog of subconscious clues, maybe memories, arrange into place. She bites down on her own tongue, drawing blood. No. _Nonononono._

She will not scream. 

She will not scream. 

She will _not_ scream for the boy with the bat. 

The boy with the buzz cut, she knows, somehow, undisputedly, is gone and lost forever. The pack, now positive that supernatural forces are to blame for this latest upheaval, has a lead now. There’s research and pack pow-wows with Deaton, and Lydia keeps every scrap of information - seemingly helpful or not, even the tiniest of details - filed fastidiously in her head. Still, an internal force goads her to develop a visual medium for their investigation. Malia, who has evidently been watching too many crime procedurals, likes to refer to it as her “scary ass murder board.” 

After a rather unfortunate incident involving red string and a staple gun, neither Malia nor Scott are allowed to touch the Scary Ass Murder Board. Their stress levels are such that, on more than one occasion, Lydia reams one or the other out for merely breathing too heavily near the Scary Ass Murder Board, which she renames, unoriginally, the mystery board. 

Calling it a murder board implies death and destruction and finality. So far, they have reason to believe that the boy with the bat might still be saved. At least, she hopes Deaton’s faith in the possibility holds true, as she cannot fathom the alternative, the walking around for the rest of her life as a banshee-shaped shell. 

A voice, somehow her own, pleads. _“You’re the one who always figures it out.”_

Turns out, maybe even the Wild Hunt cannot erase a person indefinitely. Flashes of memories buried deep come back to her, sometimes slowly, otherwise in great flashing torrents. Heads bent over notebooks, explanations of werewolves and kanimas in hushed tones. Knocking a boy to the ground beside the whoosh and crackling heat of sudden flames, the scent of gasoline harsh in her nostrils, dark Darach eyes staring her down. Blinking into consciousness on a cold metal table. Fervent kisses, precious and somehow disbelieving, against a row of lockers in a darkened high school hallway. Always the same boy, the same amber eyes. Steadiness. Warmth. Comfort. 

Armed with information, her favorite weapon (and yes, of course, actual banshee powers), Lydia, with the others, soldiers on in the battle for the boy with the bat. A steady stream of readily available memories equips her with excess resolve, a boundless reserve of _this is what you’re fighting for._ He fought for her, once, would burn whole cities to assure her safety. 

Two sides of the same coin. Partners. A perfect combination in an imperfect world. 

She was going to do the same for him. 

* * *

After, the boy with the bat, blinks at them when he comes to, wrecked and ravaged. Lydia experiences a sharp burning in her chest, like she’s been ran through with a white-hot spear, struck breathless. There are every assortment of questions and wounds to tend to, which Scott and Malia and Melissa and the Sheriff initially handle. 

Lydia stays behind. She watches, not noticing the initial shift, but eventually noting that the world has slid back into focus, like the satisfying click of a new slide slipping under a microscope, all clarity in the form of science and reason and and answers. The boy’s eyes meet hers from the distance, amber into mossy green, and the corners of her heart lift. His eyes are shy, and tentative, but grateful. The acknowledgement found in his gaze gives her the courage to inch closer, allowing a swarm of emotions - many which had been tamped down for so long - to burst to the surface. 

She flings herself into his arms, needing proof of his realness, to make sure. He wraps his arms around her, fingers tangling into her hair, her name a revered sound falling from his (dry, pale) lips. _“Lydia.”_

Moisture prickles at the corners of her eyes, her incalculable emotions surging for any outlet. The last pieces shift into the proper alignment. She holds him tighter, and whispers back. 

_“Stiles.”_

_I’m sorry,_ she tells him later, with her hands, stroking upper arms and too-elegant cheekbones belonging to a boy who is here and okay and hers. _I’m sorry I forgot you._

_But you remembered,_ his languorous, lingering kisses - her forgiveness - reassure her. _I’m sorry I left,_ he presses into her skin, fingers gripping hipbones, wrists. 

_But you came back._

**Author's Note:**

> [The Hosting of the Sidhe](http://www.bartleby.com/146/1.html) by William Butler Yeats.


End file.
